Another Morphic Tutorial
Richard A. O'Keefe
ok at atlas.otago.ac.nz
Wed Apr 18 05:09:12 UTC 2001
> I noticed that you and I both had trouble with the concepts of halos and icons.
> I called the entire surrounding pantheon of icons a halo but I think Squeakers
> generally call each of the buttons surrounding the selected object a halo. I'm
> not sure it matters _too_ much but in tutorials we probably ought to agree on
> the terminology.
Yes. Any ideas for what to call the collection of halos? A cluster of
halos? A hoopla of halos? A holy of halos?
When did this change? The Morphic tutorials I looked at a while ago
that "THE halo" (any Morph having only one) was the entire collection
of small coloured beads that came up in response to Cmd-click.
>From a dictionary:
1. A halo is a circle of light that is drawn around the heads of
saints, angles, or Jesus to show that they are holy.
2. A halo is also anything which looks like a circle of light
round a person or thing.
>From 2 you get the astronomical usage, as in "the cometary halo".
Looking at the class comment for HaloMorph in Squeak 3.0, I find
This morph provides a halo of HANDLES for its target object.
Dragging, duplicating, rotating, and resizing [are] to be
done by mousing down on the appropriate HANDLE. There are
also HANDLES for help and for a menu of infrequently used
operations.
It seems that any "real" Smalltalker (defined as someone who knows how to
use the browser to answer questions about Smalltalk) would discover that
a halo is a collection of handles.
In fact "handles" *act* like handles; or at least some of them.
You can grab a handle and use it to move the object, or expand it.
Calling a handle a halo makes about as much sense as
calling a mouse a computer.
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